What is today India’s dominant political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has had a history of putting a pause on its ideology for political benefit. It also discarded positions that became outdated in time. This aspect has become important today as we will see towards the end of this column.
For instance in the 1950s as the Jana Sangh, the party opposed Dr Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bills because it did not accept the idea of divorce — since Hindu marriages were eternal — or the ending of joint families (at root it did not want women to participate in inheritance). This position vanished with time as divorce was normalised in Hindu society and nuclear families became common in cities.
More interesting is its formal relationship with Hindutva itself. The party used the word 'Hindutva' for the first time in its 1996 manifesto. This was likely because a few months earlier on 11 December 1995, the Supreme Court had declared that Hindutva as practised by the Shiv Sena was a way of life and using it in politics did not amount to an appeal to religion. That validated the use of the word which, until that point in time, was mostly referred to negatively in the national media.
There are eight references to ‘Hindutva’ in its 1998 manifesto, along with those to Article 370, a total ban on cow slaughter and a Uniform Civil Code. But the very next year, all of these were dropped. No Hindutva........